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Parmenides

Parmenides, Venerable and Awesome: Proceedings of the International
Symposiumby Nestor-Luis Cordero (Parmenides
Publishing)
Despite Parmenides' tremendous importance during his own
lifetime and his perennial influence on philosophical thought
ever since, the great Eleatic - born circa 515 BCE and described
by Plato as "Venerable and Awesome" (Theaetetus, 183e) - had
never been the subject of an international conference until
2007, when some of the world's most eminent specialists on
Parmenides' philosophy convened for a multinational and
multilingual Symposium in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This present
volume offers a collection of the papers (translated, where
applicable) presented at the conference, each advancing the
respective scholar's current state of research on Parmenides and
his Poem, "On Nature", often with far-reaching and sometimes
controversial results. The topics discussed include the
challenge of translation, the Poem's poetic form, its logical
structure, the sequence of the fragments, the interpretation of
"Aletheia" and "Doxa", what Parmenides meant by "mortals" the
Poem's "physics" (especially Parmenidean astronomy), the various
senses of Being and the role of thought, as well as Plato's
relationship to Parmenides. In their different ways each
contribution conveys a deep appreciation for the revolutionary
nature of Parmenides' philosophy, and the collection as a whole
bears witness to the fact that the study of Parmenides continues
to yield rich and prolific scholarship - perhaps today more so
than ever. This book is intended for scholars and
non-specialists alike, and will be of particular relevance to
students of Ancient Greek Philosophy, Classical Studies, as well
as philosophy and literature more generally. It includes
contributors such as: Scott Austin; Jean Bollack; Giovanni
Casertano; Barbara Cassin; Giovanni Cerri; Nestor-Luis Cordero;
Lambros Couloubaritsis; Patricia Curd; Jean Frere; Arnold
Hermann; Charles H Kahn; Alexander P D Mourelatos; Massimo
Pulpito; Chiara Robbiano; Fernando Santoro; Jose Trindade
Santos; Jose Dueso Solana; and, Panagiotis Thanassas.

Parmenides, Venerable and Awesome discusses all aspects of
Parmenides' Poem, "On Nature", including the challenge of
translation, the Poem’s poetic form, its logical structure, the
sequence of the fragments, the interpretation of “Aletheia” and
“Doxa,” what Parmenides meant by “mortals,” the Poem’s “physics”
(especially Parmenidean astronomy), the various senses of
Being and the role of thought, as well as Plato’s relationship
to Parmenides. In their different ways each contribution conveys
a deep appreciation for the revolutionary nature of
Parmenides’ philosophy, and the collection as a whole bears
witness to the fact that the study of Parmenides continues to
yield rich and prolific scholarship—perhaps today more so than
ever.

This book is intended for scholars and non-specialists
alike, and will be of particular relevance to students of
Ancient Greek Philosophy, Classical Studies, as well as
philosophy and literature more generally.

Excerpt: Although Parmenides probably wrote as early
as the beginning of the 5th century BCE, his work was still in
circulation some eleven centuries later, even if it was considered
"a rarity" by then according to Simplicius (6th century AD).' Since
then, the text of Parmenides, like most of the treatises written in
ancient times, has been on the list of works irredeemably lost. For
several centuries, the only access to Parmenides' philosophy lay in
the rare references to his work preserved in those of other
philosophers or ancient authors, references that were sometimes
accompanied by textual quotations (which lets us assume that these
authors had a copy of the original text of Parmenides' Poem at
hand).

The practice was eventually abandoned when, by the end of the
16th century, philologists like Henri Estienne and Julius Caesar
Scaliger began to reconstruct the lost text through a meticulous
search and compilation of the quotations spread throughout classical
treatises. This process arguably culminated in 1835, when Simon
Karsten succeeded in gathering nineteen passages (one of them in
Latin) from the lost original to publish the most complete
reconstruction. We now call this set of 152 verses "Parmenides'
Poem." Thanks to the efforts of these scholars, researchers now have
an approximate (given its fragmentary nature) but faithful (given
its literal character backed-up by the work of philologists and
codicologists) version of the original poem.

Since then, we've been able to confirm that the adjectives
"venerable and awesome," used by Plato (Theaetetus, 183e) to
describe Parmenides' personality, were fully justified. "Venerable,"
without doubt, since the four or five pages that constitute the
"complete work" of Parmenides today are a relic that inspires great
respect and admiration, but also "awesome," because any
conscientious researcher must approach the fragments with precaution
and astuteness, keeping in mind the force and the power of those
pieces of the text that will most likely never be known in their
integrity.

Thousands of works have been dedicated to the study of the Poem
since the publication of Henri Estienne's Poesis Philosophica in
1573. From a formal point of view, significant progress has been
made in "cleansing" the text of impurities and erroneous readings by
the original sources, errors which were passed down and repeated
until the arrival of Hermann Diels's version in 1897, which has been
considered "orthodox" ever since. However, even Diels' cleverness
did not prevent him from introducing new anomalies to the
misreadings transmitted by tradition.2

Some questions certainly remain concerning the formal structure
of the text, such as what position certain "fragments" may have
occupied in the original. The present arrangement, which arbitrarily
establishes fragment 19 as the end of the Poem, may not correspond
with the original. As the purification of the text continues,
studies about the ideas conveyed by Parmenides find increasingly
strong and clear grounds. Proof of this lies in the remarkably high
level of discourse reached by Parmenidean studies over the last few
years. Some`titles may have escaped us, but there have been at least
thirteen books on Parmenides published between 2005 and 2008.3 In
addition, beginning in 2004, an annual philosophical conference has
been held in Ascea-Velia, where Parmenides holds a privileged
place.4 Moreover, since 2000, a prestigious publishing house (which
is honoring us with the publication of these Proceedings) has been
dedicating its efforts to the dissemination of classical thought by
invoking the great Elean: Parmenides Publishing.

Worldwide interest in Parmenidean studies has also touched the
austral end of the Southern hemisphere, and in November 2007, the
&quot{Centro de Estudios de Filosofia Antigua" (CEFA) of the National
University of San Martin (Buenos Aires, Argentina), decided to
dedicate an International Symposium to the philosophy of Parmenides.
Invited to participate in the event were those main scholars who had
published at least one book on Parmenides.5 Sixteen authors
confirmed their participation (two who were unable to attend
nevertheless sent their contributions).

Part I of the present volume gathers together the set of papers
presented at the Symposium, whose topics were divided up based on
the "traditional" structure of the Poem: one section dedicated to
the exposition of the way of truth, and the other to the description
of the "opinions (8ó ca) of mortals." This

rigorous partition was nevertheless an object of criticism and
the source of much debate as to its meaning. Panagiotis Thanassas,
for instance, discusses the dual structure of the Poem and its
impact on the traditional perception of Parmenides as a rigorous
"monist." Jean Bollack found that the most satisfactory solution to
explaining the two parts of the Poem lies in considering the whole
and to show that one part, the definition of Being, actually refers
to the other as the projection of an organization of the world, and
that both terms correspond perfectly to each other.

Other papers went deeply into the part of the Poem concerning the
"opinions of mortals." Jean Frère proposed to restrict the "mortals"
to just certain people who were part of particular philosophical
schools, specifically the Pythagoreans. But most presentations
examined the value of "Parmenidean Physics" as shown in this part of
the poem. Giovanni Casertano discussed the special status of
Parmenides in the history of scientific thought, while Massimo
Pulpito proposed to limit correct physical theories to certain
passages of the Poem, which would be a development of the formula
"r& ." Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, on his part, was interested in
some astronomical theories that he considers to be "breakthroughs."
More radically, my own paper read all fragments referring to the
physics as part of the speech on truth, because, given the not-true
and deceptive character that Parmenides attributes to dios, "Parmenidean
physics" cannot belong to the "opinions of mortals." This
proposition therefore suggests a new rearrangement of the fragments.

The section of the Poem concerning the fact of being and its
characteristics was the subject of Robbiano's, Solana Dueso's,
Santoro's, and Austin's papers. Chiara Robbiano, answering the
question "What is Parmenides' Being?" found that Being is the
fundamental unity of what-is and what-understands, the unity that is
also the condition for the possibility of human understanding. José
Solana Dueso analyzed the relationship between logic and ontology,
and proposed different arguments for a primarily logical and only
secondarily ontological interpretation of the physis of Parmenides (fr.
2—fr. 8.50). Fernando Santoro found in the "ontos" of fragment 8 a
genealogy of the idea of ontological categories. And Scott Austin
affirmed that Parmenides' absolute monism puts existence and essence
into an absolutely monistic Being as it joins levels in an
ontological hierarchy that other philosophers were later to
separate.

Two further contributions dealt an analysis of the notion of
"thought." For José Trindade Santos the identity of thought and
Being dominates Parmenides' argument in the Way of Truth and
persists in later relevant conceptions as Platonic and Aristotelian
"active intellect." Patricia Curd on her part analyzed the relation
between thought and body, as suggested by fragment 16, and saw that
the mortal's error is to mistake the passive experiences of sense
perception for genuine thought about what-is, and hence fail to
understand the true nature of what-is.

Arnold Hermann was interested in Parmenides' heritage in Plato's
Parmenides, and considers that the so-called "parricide" of the
Sophist is only an heir. Finally, Barbara Cassin asked the question
that every scholar silently asks himself: Is it possible to
translate Parmenides? The eventual conclusion is that "Parmenides is
lost in translation."

The organizers of the meeting, which was open to the public,
offered eight young and high-level Argentine researchers (graduate
students, professors, or advanced students) the opportunity to
present a short paper in front of the prestigious assembly of
foreign authors. The exchange of ideas between them and their
"teachers" was a very enriching experience. These eight papers are
included in Part II of the present volume.

The International Symposium's success would have been impossible
without the support of two prestigious institutions: Parmenides
Publishing (United States), and the HYELE Institute for Comparative
Studies (Switzerland), an institution whose name alludes to the
polis of Parmenides. The CEFA is greatly and deeply thankful to both
institutions for their support. —Néstor-Luis
Cordero

Parmenides has survived the "parricide" committed against him
in Plato's Sophist
and in every philosophy of plurality and becoming. Despite the
brevity of the fragments of his poem, supposedly titled
On Nature (Peri
Phuseos), and the apparent simplicity of its central
thought -- "being is" -- Parmenides continues to nourish
speculation, historical research, and philological debate. We
now even have Parmenides Publishing, which has printed or
reprinted over half a dozen studies of the pre-Socratic to date.
The series Continuum Studies in Ancient Philosophy currently
includes no fewer than three books on the topic: Raymond Tallis'
The Enduring Significance
of Parmenides, Lisa Atwood Wilkinson's
Parmenides and To Eon,
and Vishwa Adluri's
Parmenides, Plato, and Mortal Philosophy. Adluri's work
stands out for the radicality of its argument, the subtlety of
its interdisciplinary interpretations, and the forthright
passion that motivates it.

Adluri's radical reading denies that Parmenides is the enemy
of plurality and becoming. How can this be, if the poem bluntly
argues that, since "being is," becoming is unthinkable and being
is eternally one -- pastless, futureless, and featureless? The
answer begins in plain sight, on the surface of the poem, but
this surface has been ignored all too often by readers who
assume they already know what Parmenides stands for.
Parmenides does not in fact say "being is." The phrase (with its
sundry tortured variations) is uttered by an unnamed goddess who
addresses the poem's narrator. The poem begins in the first
person, describing the narrator's (Parmenides'?) passionate
journey ("as far as
thumos might reach," fragment 1, line 1) to the gates of
the divine domain. The goddess then welcomes the voyager and
presents two accounts: an account of the "truth" (monistic
being) and an account of mortal opinions about the mutable
cosmos. The usual assumption is that the first-person proem is
window dressing: like the dactylic hexameter, it is a remnant of
or concession to the prephilosophical, mythmaking culture from
which Parmenides is emerging. The goddess' first account is
assumed to be Parmenides' own theory. Her second account is then
problematic: if there is
nothing but being, how can there "be" a plurality of phenomena,
opinions (whether true or untrue), and opiners? Parmenides the
monist turns out to be an extreme dualist, due to his
uncompromising split between reality and appearance. Our task is
then to construct a logical solution to this split -- if not
within Parmenides' theory itself, then in our own physical or
metaphysical theories.

In contrast, Adluri proposes that Parmenides' theme is
precisely the conflict between the constructs of logical
theories and the lived reality of our changing world. The youth
(kouros) who
narrates the poem strives to escape this world; he is presented
with a vision of a timeless reality; but the goddess' second
speech directs him to "return from transcendence" to the
changing cosmos. Parmenides does not resolve the contradiction
between being and becoming, but presents the tension between the
two, a tension that must be narrated rather than summed up in an
atemporal theory. Thus, "Parmenides' genius consists not in
launching a method of logical argument, but in documenting a
basic experience of life" (38). The poetic form of Parmenides'
writing is not window dressing at all, but is essential to the
mythic mediation between eternity and temporality; myth recounts
the journey that is mortal existence (7, 11, 18-19, 29-31,
39-40). (For another recent appreciation of the mythopoetic
character of Parmenides' thought see Wilkinson,
Parmenides and To Eon.)

Adluri's passionate concern is the tragedy of this journey:
the world that the kouros
desires in vain to escape is not merely a world in motion, but a
world that moves us emotionally -- the realm of "hateful birth"
(12.4) and fateful perishing (19.2). The goddess is immortal,
not in the superficial sense that the day of her demise will
never arrive, but because she transcends temporality itself; we
mortals, however, who can at best glimpse such a state through
the exercise of our reason, must fail to transcend time and
death. We seek "metaphysics" to save us from our finitude, but
we inevitably remain subject to "physics" -- the realm of
generation and decay. It is not that Adluri denies all eternal
truth: phusis
includes stable and knowable dimensions. But when we embrace
atemporal laws as a substitute for or distraction from our
mortal finitude, they become deeply deceptive (2, 16-17, 79).
Adluri thus suggests an ethics of "mortal rectitude" that would
avoid the illusory comforts of metaphysics (20, 41, 172). At his
most defiant, he rejects monism in general, including monotheism
(2-3); however, no such rejection can be final if "we are as
metaphysical as we are mortal" (6).

Finitude concerns each of us personally, and Adluri is candid
about his personal stake in his investigation: he studied with
Reiner Schürmann at the end of Schürmann's life, and witnessed
the vitality ebb away from this unusually gifted teacher (3-5).
Schürmann's reflections on natality, mortality, and the
individual whose singularity escapes metaphysical structures
were borne out in his own existence and his own undoing. Much as
Plato bears witness to the life and death of Socrates, Adluri
pays tribute to his teacher implicitly and explicitly throughout
this book that is, in a sense, Schürmann's "biography" (4).
Parmenides, Adluri admits, allows him to express his own and
Schürmann's philosophy -- which is not to imply that he has not
learned from the pre-Socratic (34).

Adluri's interpretation of Parmenides thus has a confessed
point of view, but it is by no means a mechanical imposition of
Schürmann's concepts on the ancient text. Adluri works with the
literary, religious, and linguistic dimensions of Parmenides'
words, showing a fine attention to detail. His interpretive
skill is on display not only in the body of the book, but also
in the appendix (137-156), which presents a new translation of
Peri Phuseos with
helpful notes.

Adluri's work deserves a place on the reading list of every
student of pre-Socratic thought, but one could not consider it
the definitive work on Parmenides. He does not pretend to an
exhaustive account of the literature, and his direct analysis of
the goddess' speech on being is surprisingly concise (72-77).
Adluri relies on the reader's familiarity with established
analyses of the text and rarely rehearses these discussions in
detail. Sometimes his readings are tenuous. For instance, he
makes a good case that in early Greek,
thumos, unlike psyche, indicates an
aspect of human life that has to expire at death (21-28); but is
it fair to conclude from the use of
thumos in the first
line of Parmenides' poem that the mortal condition is front and
center in the philosopher's concerns (54-55)? Adluri rightly
observes that the goddess presents a speech that is directed at
an individual and attempts to persuade him; but can we conclude
that Parmenides is a deeply dialogical thinker (64, 76) when, in
the surviving fragments, the
kouros never utters
a word in response to the goddess?

Adluri's discussion of non-contradiction could also be
developed more carefully. He claims that "'at the same time' is
the tacit and forgotten basis of the principle of
non-contradiction, a basis that is taken for granted, as if the
principle existed outside of time" (72). This may be true of the
goddess' speech, but certainly not of Plato (Republic
436b), Aristotle (Metaphysics
IV), and many later logicians. In any case, Adluri has raised
the crucial question of whether Parmenides' goddess correctly
derives timelessness from the principle of non-contradiction or
surreptitiously presupposes time in this principle itself; but
the question calls for a more thorough investigation.

There is also a difficulty in interpreting the goddess as
"the arch-critic of metaphysics" (84) in her second,
cosmological account. In Adluri's usage, "metaphysics" refers to
any attempt to make logical sense of becoming in terms of stable
structures (16-17). So "metaphysics" includes theoretical
physics -- such as the cosmological fragments of
Peri Phuseos, which
seem to present patterns and explanations, not singularities.
The "return from transcendence" has to be read between the lines
or inferred from facts such as the very existence of the poem
that recounts the journey (51).

Adluri's reading of Parmenides is the heart of this book, but
it also contains an excellent interpretation of Plato's
Phaedrus that brings
out its thematic parallels to Parmenidean thought. Adluri does
not, as one might expect, concentrate on the noetic vision of
eternal being described at
Phaedrus 247c-e.
Instead, he considers the entire dialogue in terms of its
treatment of mortal individuals, who can be loved and who die.
The Platonic question, according to Adluri, is "what does it
mean to be a finite, singular, ephemeral mortal whose mortality
cannot be preserved, but whose
logoi can be?" (99).
Against Derrida's well-known critique of Plato's supposed
privileging of speech over writing, Adluri argues that the
Phaedrus
problematizes language as a whole, both written and spoken, due
to its tendency to abstract from singularity. Socrates and Plato
try to develop a mode of discourse that is directed at
individuals in their finitude. The central issue in the
dialogue, then, is not writing as a
pharmakon
(remedy/poison), but Socrates himself as a
pharmakos or
sacrificial victim (113-114).

Adluri's rich account of the
Phaedrus adds
persuasiveness and resonance to his necessarily somewhat
speculative approach to the fragments of Parmenides. We might
adduce two more Platonic texts that support Adluri's position.
Plato's Parmenides
represents the old pre-Socratic as a master of dialectic, and
not as its slave: we must, he says, play the "laborious game"
(137b) of taking logos
as far as it can go;
after this exercise useful for youths (135d), we can think
properly. Plato seems to tell us that Parmenides, unlike the
hyperrationalist goddess of his poem, is a mortal thinker who
has tested the limits of abstract ratiocination. As for
Socrates' concern with singular mortals, consider the kind of
knowledge that he represents himself as seeking, first and
foremost, in the dialogue on the nature of knowledge. He
wants to know which Athenian youths are most promising (Theaetetus
143d). When, later in this dialogue, he caricatures the
"philosopher" as one who overlooks individuals for the sake of
Man (174b), he is not describing Socratic philosophy at all, but
the disengaged theorizing of his interlocutor, the geometer and
astronomer Theodorus. Adluri is quite right to find a "return
from transcendence" in Plato, and in the light of the Greek
theme of knowing oneself by knowing one's limits, his reading of
Parmenides becomes compelling.

Adluri concludes with a criticism of Heidegger, whose
revolutionary retrieval of the pre-Socratics lies in the
background of many of Adluri's interpretations (see especially
Heidegger's 1942-43 lecture course on Parmenides). Adluri argues
that Heidegger subscribes to a Lutheran program of salvation in
history that distracts him from singular mortality, and that his
analyses of being-toward-death in
Being and Time are
formalistic (129-133).

OOn the whole, Adluri's work is a stimulating return to early
Greek thought from a contemporary but not merely contemporary
perspective, grounded not only in the realities posited by
philosophy, but in the reality lived by existing philosophers.
Adluri's further research extends beyond Greek thought to
Sanskrit epic. We can look forward to more of his provocative
studies of ancient texts informed by vivid existential concerns.

Excerpt: Philosophical writing can be a form of idolatry. Not all forms of
writing are, of
course, and I do not believe that writing itself is to be blamed.
But hardly had
Reiner passed away, when his "philosophy"—that is, his bibliography,
not his biography—supplanted him as a cheap idol (Greek eidolon) would.
In one seminar, I was amazed to hear this ultimate condemnation of him:`"a nice
guy, but influenced by an errant philosophy." Though
bibliographically defensible (its opposite can also be proven by
more careful readers; facts can be used in any way), biographically
this is wrong on three counts. Reiner was not a "nice" guy. He was
mercilessly intolerant of pretension and just about as polite as
Socrates. In terms of "influence," his philosophical praxis
consisted solely of the discovery of cracks in all foundations.
Reiner was less susceptible to fashionable philosophies than
Socrates was to Alkibiades. The term anarchy, which had many levels
of meanings for him except the most obvious one, also means the
susceptibility of all "influences" to critical questioning. Finally,
errant philosophy is a sword that cuts both ways: as soon as a
philosophy becomes conspicuously errant, such as Heidegger's is
alleged to be, it begins to teach even greater and subtler
philosophical lessons.

Biographically, Reiner taught me the difference between
particularity and singularity. In his writing, he clarifies the
difference as follows: "death as mine temporalizes phenomena
because it is absolutely singular. But the singular cannot be
treated as the determinate negation of the universal; the contrary
opposite of the universal is the particular. It takes a neglect of
the persistent tie between time and the singular, a tie signified to
me by my death, to append these conflicting strategies to the list,
long since Antiquity, of terms that are mutually exclusive within a
genus and jointly exhaustive of it.

For Reiner, interested in the public sphere, the singular was a
tool to demonstrate the illegitimacy of univocally binding
"phantasms," such as totalitarianism. For me, interested in Reiner,
the singular was happily the object of love, tragically the object
of death, and ultimately, the face and fate of all phusis. Knowing
Reiner in his last days was nothing more and nothing less than what
walking with Socrates must have been for Phaedrus. In one way or
another, all shadows of the immortals that covered up the mortal
singular—be it the city, hyperurania, philosophical or erotic
genera—fell away from my eyes like scales falling off the eyes of a
blind man. No more generalizing philosophy for me in the style of
Lysias! Like Parmenides (I argue), no matter how seductive the realm
of eternal, simple being may be, we must return to our pluralistic
mortal cosmos, where singulars are possible. In this work, which is
a continuation of the journey I began with Reiner, I extend his
notion of mortality to redefine (if definition is even possible in
the realm of singulars) human beings and phusis in terms of mortal
temporality.

Once I displaced eternal Forms by mortal finitude and embraced
mortal fate instead of the seductions of epistemology (which natural
science pursues more fruitfully than philosophy), I found my
concerns resonating with the voices of the pre-Socratics. Their
suspicion of knowledge for its own sake and their awareness of mortal finitude endeared them to me. I have learned
many things from Heidegger, but I differ from him significantly,
especially in his approach to the pre-Socratics. I find that his
Parmenides lectures chart an altogether different landscape than the
one in which I am journeying. Whereas his paradigmatic description
of temporality is historical (Seinsgeschichte), I champion the
individual life-span. Man, in general, does not appear to me in
Geschichte, or in its narrative; the opposite is more convincing to
me. For me, there is no "history of being," there is no "history" at
all; there is only the life-story of the singular. Nor does
metaphysics satisfy me. Metaphysics has no history and is
insufficiently heedful of time. The various forms of evasion of
temporality and erasure of the singular all set themselves up beyond
man in the same way: through a forgetting of mortal time. Thus the
end of metaphysics for me is not an event in the history of being;
it is the loss of relevance and dignity of these interpretations,
inadequately respectful of time as they are, in the hour of death of
a loved one. The end of metaphysics is a function of the end of a
singular life-span. The beginning, which invokes the pre-Socratics,
becomes in a certain sense no beginning at all, but an enduring in
this end, an enduring that is, ultimately, not possible. We are as
metaphysical as we are mortal. I will demonstrate that the very
faculty that impels us to seek nutrition and guides our growth also
gives birth to metaphysics (I call this faculty of the soul thumos).
Thus the task of enduring at the end is practically a returning to
the beginning again and again, an endless homecoming.

Thus Socrates returns from the vision of the forms to hemlock,
and the youth in Parmenides' poem returns, I argue, to the mortal
cosmos, and my philosophical journey leads away from metaphysics to
live and die among mortals—without succumbing to philosophy's
bibliographic temptation.

This work reflects my interest in making mortal individuality
significant to philosophy. To do this, I engage in a dialogue with
the founding fathers of Western metaphysics: Plato and Parmenides.
Were they exclusively concerned with immortal forms and eternal
being? Does mortality, as a painful but real condition, not play a
crucial role in their philosophy? I think it does. Parmenides gives
us not one, but two logoi. One is the goddess' famous argument for
eternal being. But her second account, the mortal doxa, retains
mortality as an irreducible reality. Plato also retains mortality,
in an even more powerful form: the individual mortal, Socrates,
remains incarnate and in dialogue with immortal Forms.

I frame the issue of mortality and immortality in temporal terms,
arguing for a tragic return to a philosophy of mortality.

In Chapter 1, I show the centrality of time to philosophy. Rather
than engage in a "philosophy of time," I shift the focus from
general arguments to concrete individuality. To do this, I
reinterpret individuality, extending from birth to death, as the
primary mode for understanding temporality. Analysis proceeds not
through abstract argumentation, but through paving attention to
various expressions of individual being in the philosophical texts
under consideration: thumos or the mortal soul, and journey. I
contrast individuality and its mortal temporality to the accounts of
time traditionally given in metaphysics. Indeed, I interpret
traditional metaphysical denials of time as an attempt to deny
painful mortal temporality.

Chapter 2 introduces Parmenides and his work. In his
philosophical poem, we find the clearest articulation of mortality
and immortality, and their irreducible opposition. Previous
scholarship has ignored those portions of the poem that complicate
the traditional obsession with his argument for eternal being: I
briefly discuss these interpretations and their limitations and
point out the complex multiplicity of Parmenides' poem taken as a
whole.

The following three chapters deal with each of the three parts of
Parmenides' poem: the proem (his journey to the realm of the
goddess); the goddess' speech on eternal being, its unity and
immutability; and finally her returning him (in speech) to the world
of the mortals, a cosmological description we may not overlook.

Chapter 3 focuses on the proem in which Parmenides recounts his
protagonist's journey to the goddess. His text introduces two
crucial themes, those of thumos and journey. Thumos (or, as I call
it, the "mortal soul") propels the youth on his journey from
mortality to an immortal realm. Thumos embodies both mortality,
since it is rooted in phusis (marked by individual birth and death),
and the painful awareness of its own finitude, which it manifests as
a desire to transcend its own mortality. The motif of journey best
maps the trajectory of mortal individuality. Journey is not a
metaphor, but a mode of being in phusis and thus a primary mode for
philosophy as well. To paraphrase John Dewey's words (pertaining to
education): journey is not a metaphor for life; instead "journey" is
life itself.

I attempt to subvert the dominant hegemonic paradigm of eternal
being in Chapter 4. Here I discuss the goddess' speech on aletheia
or true being. I expose its dependence on multiplicity,
contradiction, and duplication—features she suppresses through
logical argumentation. Her monologue on true being only works at the
level of abstract reasoning or logos, because logos by its nature is
unable to express the temporality of phusis coming-to-be and
passing-away."

Chapter 5 deals with the Eleatic's breathtaking cosmology, which
returns the mortal youth's attention in the poem to his proper topos:
the cosmos of becoming and change. Here it becomes clear that the
journey Parmenides undertakes is a "round-trip" to the goddess'
metaphysical realm. Scholars have previously read the contradiction
of the goddess' two speeches as denying phenomenal reality
(something unthinkable to a pre-Socratic) ,12 but I argue that it is
meant to draw limits to the logos she unfolds in her ontological
demonstration.

From Parmenides, I turn to Plato in Chapter 6, and read his
Phaedrus with these themes in view. The Phaedrus is Plato's most
Parmenidean work. Many commentators readily grant that the two
thinkers share the theme of immortal being. But I suggest another,
deeper connection between the two thinkers, one that I call the
mortal journey. Plato and Parmenides engage in dialogue with each
other not only about issues of epistemology, but also-about other
crucial issues: mortality, living in the physical world of change,
and the longings of the soul (whether thumos or psukhe). Such a reading of Plato relates him
back to the pre-Socratics as well as to our contemporary existential
concerns.

I focus on Plato's obsession with individuality, pluri-vocality,
and his juxtaposition of a living mortal individual, Socrates, with
the generality of logos (writing). These themes, often ignored in
favor of an epistemology of Forms, become crucial in his dialogue
the Phaedrus. Along the way, my discussion offers a critique of
Derrida's influential theory of the pharmakon.

In the Conclusion, I return to Heidegger's influential thesis of
the "end of metaphysics" and argue that the tragic reading of
Parmenides presented here points a way beyond Heidegger's thought. I
underscore the theological resonances of Heidegger's philosophy and
argue that Heidegger fails to understand the tragic wisdom of the
Greeks." The retrieval of singularity in Reiner Schürmann's thought
enables a return to the Greeks, in which the fate of the mortal
singular once again becomes a powerful tool for deconstructing
metaphysics. The need to return to Parmenides is thus implicitly
bound up with the need to rethink our own present
"post-metaphysical" anti-tragic age.

The Appendix presents a new, complete translation of the
surviving fragments of Parmenides' poem, "On Nature," with some
notes on reading it." I comment on particular readings of the Greek
text and offer my interpretations of them. I pay close attention to
the nuances of Parmenides' brilliant poetic language. For practical
reasons, not all of these remarks have been fully developed in the
thematic accounts in the preceding chapters. Therefore these textual
notes are an integral part of my reading of Parmenides and should
not be overlooked as mere technical addenda.

I hope that this book with its title Return from Transcendence
will be the first stage in a larger project where transcendence is
rethought beyond metaphysics. I will address this in a separate
work. Ever since Socrates defined human mortality as the single
preoccupation of philosophers, philosophy has had a unique and
original relationship to death. In the modern period, Nietzsche
gives the question of mortality new urgency through proclaiming the
death of god." Heidegger defines human being in terms of its unique
relationship to death: only humans are capable of death as death.'
Despite his questionable political entanglement, Heidegger's
philosophy decisively shaped twentieth-century philosophy. His
student Hannah Arendt made the question of "singularity," that is,
of the unique trajectory between birth and death each one of us is,
central to philosophy. Reiner Schürmann applied the concept of
singularity as an ethical and political force in his work Broken
Hegemonies.' I would like this book to be read as a philosophical
engagement with this tradition.

Once one rejects the thesis of time as finite or as jeweilig, it
seems one must necessarily also lose the emphasis upon
individuality. Indeed, it seems as though Heidegger is correct when
he, following Kierkegaard, suggests it is only through the
experience of oneself as radically jeweilig and finite and thus in
need of salvation that true individuality becomes possible. But, as
I have argued in the better part of this work, this is not so.
Indeed, I have attempted to show how richly aware ancient thinkers
such as Parmenides and Plato were of the need to preserve mortal
singularity and that they were more sensitive to the complex issues
at stake in articulating individuality than we moderns are. For
us, the question of this radical individuality becomes merely a
question of persona—it is either the subject within or the identity
without.

I would therefore like to close this concluding section by
opposing "deconstruction" as a methodological response to the
problem of individuality with "initiation" as a model for preserving
singularity. In singularity, I not only find a more radical
deconstruction of metaphysics qua metaphysics, but also a
deconstruction that is truer to the mortal condition.

Recent researches by Burkert and Kingsley have shown that the
initiatory model pervasively structures ancient thought. In fact,
Burkert has argued that Parmenides' poem can only be understood when
one sees the journey as replicating a katabasis. Further, Burkert
argues for a "religious" experience at the heart of Parmenides'
poem, an experience at once deceptively close and utterly distant
from the theologia cruets of Heidegger. Parmenides and Plato
explicate the ultimate concern of mortals by using the language of
mysteries at the core of their philosophical experience. I believe
that the initiatory model better preserves the aspects of
individuality than Heidegger's theologically motivated valorization
of Jeweiligkeit. But more than that, I would like to claim that the
ancient analysis—what I have referred to here as the "crossing of
mortals and immortals"—provides us a better avenue for thinking
about a possible non-metaphysical transcendence.

In contrast, Heidegger's Seinsgeschichte leaves us with only two
possibilities:

The rejection of every form of transcendence in favor of the
experience of "lived temporality," which Heidegger considers
characteristic of Early Christianity and finds exemplified in Scotus.

Thus beyond Heidegger and his emphasis on facticity and rejection
of metaphysics, Parmenides' thought remains curiously ahead of us.
Heidegger's deconstruction of metaphysics is useful in recovering
the theologia crucis, but Plato and Parmenides have a different
approach to questions of ultimate concern. They begin with the
mortal condition and not with textuality, as I showed in my Phaedrus
commentary. Thus, the focus is not on deconstructing a tradition,
but on making the ultimate concern of the philosophical
adept—whether the kouros or Phaedrus—primary. Here, both Plato and
Parmenides give an answer that deserves a genuine philosophical
explication. My analysis has taken the form of a "return" from the
transcendence of metaphysics, texts, and traditions. But, from this
'purified' state, is another form of transcendence possible for the
mortal singular? But that is a subject for another work: here, I end
the "purification" portion of Parmenides, that is, our traditional
reception. A philosophical investigation whereby Parmenides provides
a positive response to the ultimate concerns of the mortal reader
constitutes the next step.

'Plato’s Parmenides and
Its Heritage' presents in two volumes ground-breaking results in the
history of interpretation of Plato’s Parmenides, the culmination of
six years of international collaboration by the SBL Annual Meeting
seminar, “Rethinking Plato’s Parmenides and Its Platonic, Gnostic
and Patristic Reception” (2001–2007).

The theme of Volume 1 is the dissolution of firm boundaries
for thinking about the tradition of Parmenides interpretation from
the Old Academy through Middle Platonism and Gnosticism. The volume
suggests a radically different interpretation of the history of
thought from Plato to Proclus than is customary by arguing against
Proclus’s generally accepted view that there was no metaphysical
interpretation of the Parmenides before Plotinus in the third
century C.E. Instead, this volume traces such metaphysical
interpretations, first, to Speusippus and the early Platonic
Academy; second, to the Platonism of the first and second centuries
C.E. in figures like Moderatus and Numenius; third, to the emergence
of an exegetical tradition that read Aristotle’s categories in
relation to the Parmenides; and, fourth, to important Middle
Platonic figures and texts. The contributors to Volume 1 are Kevin
Corrigan, Gerald Bechtle, Luc Brisson, John Dillon, Thomas Szlezák,
Zlatko Pleše, Noel Hubler, John D. Turner, Johanna Brankaer, Volker
Henning Drecoll, and Alain Lernould.

Volume 2 examines and establishes for the first time evidence for a
significant knowledge of the Parmenides in Philo, Clement, and
patristic sources. It offers an extensive and balanced analysis of
the case for and against the various possible attributions of date
and authorship of the Anonymous Commentary in relation to
Gnosticism, Middle Platonism, and Neoplatonism and argues that on
balance the case for a pre-Plotinian authorship is warranted. It
also undertakes for the first time in this form an examination of
the Parmenides in relation to Jewish and Christian thought, moving
from Philo and Clement through Origen and the Cappadocians to
Pseudo-Dionysius. The contributors to Volume 2 are Matthias Vorwerk,
Kevin Corrigan, Luc Brisson, Volker Henning Drecoll, Tuomas Rasimus,
John F. Finamore, John M. Dillon, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Gerald Bechtle,
David T. Runia, Mark Edwards, Jean Reynard, and Andrew
Radde-Gallwitz.

Excerpt: These two volumes collect the work of twenty-two scholars from
ten different countries presented in a seminar, "Rethinking Plato's
Parmenides and Its Platonic, Gnostic and Patristic Reception," that
was held during six annual meetings of the Society of Biblical
Literature from 2001 to 2006 and that has broken new ground on
several fronts in the history of interpretation of Plato's
Parmenides. There was also a special conference, "Mittelplatonisches
im nachplotinischen Diskurs bis Augustin and Proklos," held at the
end of July, 2007 in Tubingen, Germany, organized and hosted by
Volker Drecoll, whose results were published in the Zeitschrift fur
Antikes Christentum (ZAC) 12, 2008. Four of those papers have been
included in vol. 2 of this collection by kind permission of the
editors and publisher (Walter de Gruyter) of ZAC.

Two of the most impressive features of this extended enterprise
have been the excellent, free spirit of international collaborative
scholarship, still quite rare in the Humanities, and the dedicated
commitment of our small community to sustain the project over what
has effectively been a six-year period. Since not only Plato's
Parmenides itself but also the various traditions or instances of
its interpretation are difficult and highly complex, we provide here
a detailed survey of the contents of the two volumes so as to make
this collaborative, interdisciplinary work as accessible as possible
to students and scholars in many fields.

The overall theme of vol. 1 is the dissolution of traditionally
rather firm boundaries for thinking about the tradition of
Parmenides interpretation from the Old Academy up to and including
the beginnings of what has become known as Neoplatonism. The volume
suggests a radically different interpretation of the history of
thought from Plato to Proclus than is customary by arguing against
Proclus's generally accepted view that there was no metaphysical
interpretation of the Parmenides before Plotinus in the third
century C.E. Instead, this volume traces such metaphysical
interpretations, first, to Speusippus and the early Platonic
Academy; second, to the Platonism of the first and second centuries
C.E. in figures like Moderatus and Numenius, who began to uncover
various metaphysical realities in the "hypotheses" of the second
part of the Parmenides; third, to the emergence of an exegetical
tradition that read Aristotle's categories in relation to the
Parmenides; and fourth, to important Middle Platonic fialogues, but also the product of a
long philosophical tradition that started right after Plato's death
and went through a stage (the period of Middle Platonism that
extends from 80 BC to 220 AD) in which elements of Platonic
philosophy were already combined in a variety of ways with aspects
of Aristotelianism and Stoicism." But it is from around 200 AD, that
the 'new world' resulting from the dynamic interaction between these
strands begins to emerge, and takes shape over the next three
centuries.'

A few names and rphyry's testimony in
Simplicius) has undergone interpolation with a much later
Neoplatonic set of ideas; and 4) it also shows that, despite the
undoubted importance of Plotinus, the traditional view of Plotinus
as the "father" of Neoplatonism and "originator" of the doctrine of
the three "Ones," should be seriously rethought on the basis that
not only Plotinus, but also Gnostic and Platonic thinkers that
preceded him, seem to be the joint inheritors of a tradition that
may well go back to the early Academy.

Volume 1 focuses on the earlier period from Plato and the Old
Academy up to Middle Platonism and Gnosticism, with a critical eye
upon direct or indirect testimonies from the later Neoplatonists and
others, Volume 2 first examines the Neoplatonic tradition itself
from Plotinus to Damascius and then takes a broader comparative view
of the reception of the Parmenides by such important figures as
Philo, Clement, and certain other Patristic authors up to
Pseudo-Dionysius.

VOLUME 1: PLATO'S PARMENIDES: HISTORY AND INTERPRETATION FROM THE
OLD ACADEMY TO LATER PLATONISM AND GNOSTICISM

SECTION 1: PLATO, FROM THE OLD ACADEMY TO MIDDLE PLATONISM

Kevin Corrigan sets the scene by problematizing the place of the
Parmenides in Plato's writings and by providing an overview of some
of the major interpretations ranging from the time of Proclus's
Commentary on the Parmenides to contemporary scholarship. Corrigan
suggests that, despite Proclus's apparent view that there were no
metaphysical interpretations before Plotinus, the intrinsically
thought-provoking nature even of an aporetic dialogue such as the
Parmenides (when put beside its earlier counterpart dialogue of
ideas, the Symposium) makes it unlikely that such metaphysical
interpretations arose only in late antiquity, especially when one
considers hints of such interpretations in earlier authors: in the
"episodic" system of Speusippus, in Moderatus, Eudorus, and
Nicomachus of Gerasa, in the apparently pre-Plotinian Sethian
Platonizing Gnostic texts, and in Middle Platonic thought in
general, especially the Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides,
attributed to Porphyry by Pierre Hadot, but possibly composed even
earlier than Plotinus.

There then follow three different perspectives on Speusippus.
Gerald Bechtle asks what "points of contact" between Plato's
Parmenides and Speusippus's metaphysical system might have meant,
especially since such points of contact do not necessarily imply a
paraphrase or a definite system of principles in either Plato or
Speusippus, and since such contact may have been bidirectional, as
has been proposed by Andreas Graeser, who has hypothesized that
Plato wrote the Parmenides as a reaction against Speusippus's theory
of principles. Bechtle then undertakes a brief reconstruction of
Speusippus's doctrine of principles (the One and Multiplicity) on
the basis of both Aristotelian material and later Platonist texts.
He argues that the tenet of the One as smallest principle does not
necessitate a view of the One as deficient negativity or as
(Neoplatonic) transcendent non-being or beyond-being, but it should
rather be interpreted in a neutral way according to which the One is
not any determinate being in the stereometric, planimetric, linear,
or mathematical dimensions deduced from it. He concludes that there
are clear links between Speusippus's metaphysics and the Parmenides.
First, the dichotomic method of the second part of the Parmenides
and Speusippus's equally exhaustive diairetic semantics are
conducted exactly on the same logical principles. Second, the first
and third Parmenidean deductions (about the one in relation to
itself and the others in relation to the one, on the hypothesis that
the one exists) and Speusippus's views on the relation between the
one and the many are genuinely comparable and concern exactly the
same topic, namely, they explore possibilities of how to conceive
and render functional the principles necessary to explain how all of
reality comes about.

Luc Brisson tackles the question from a different perspective. He
starts with a fragment attributed to Speusippus in the Anonymous
Commentary on the Parmenides. By means of a critical analysis of
texts in Damascius, Proclus, Iamblichus, Porphyry (as attested in
Cyril of Alexandria), and Plotinus that seem to refer to it,
Brisson, following Carlos Steel, argues that this fragment does not
go back to the historical Speusippus, but instead derives from a
Neopythagorean apocryphon that reveals a Neopythagorizing
interpretation of the Parmenides proposed in the first two centuries
C.E. that is used by the Neoplatonists (perhaps Amelius or Porphyry)
to interpret the first series of deductions of the second part of
the Parmenides. We are therefore deprived of what looked at first
sight to be quasi-direct access to Speusippus himself even though
tantalizingly closer to relatively early Parmenides-interpretation,
albeit through the lens of Neoplatonic spectacles.

Finally, John Dillon argues that an ontological interpretation of
Plato's argument in the second hypothesis (about the generation of
number at Parm. 142d-144a, and especially 143c-144a) may have been
behind Speusippus's theory about the way the universe is generated
from a radically unitary and simple first principle, and that this
theory has actually left traces in Plotinus's doctrine of numbers in
5.6 [34]. This view seems, on the one hand, to contradict the
consensus (based on Proclus) that earlier generations of Platonists
took the Parmenides simply as a logical exercise, but, on the other
hand, to render Moderatus's derivation of a system of hypostases
from the first three hypotheses of the Parmenides more
comprehensible.

What ultimately interests Plotinus is an insight derived from
Speusippus, namely, that the first product of the union of the
primal One and Multiplicity is not the Forms, but Number. Being is prior to Number (as against
Speusippus), but Number is prior to beings or the multiplicity of the Forms
(as Speusippus asserted). Plotinus finds room for forms as well as
numbers, whereas Speusippus wanted to relegate forms to the level of
the World Soul. However, if we are prepared to suppose that
Speusippus assigned an ontological value to the first two
hypotheses, then we may well go further (on the understanding that
we cannot know definitively whether or not this was actually the
case) and suggest that, since Speusippus seems to have posited a
five-level universe, he probably took the first five hypotheses as
representing levels of reality, while the last four hypotheses
simply reinforced—in negative terms—the necessity of there being a
One. Hence the matching of the first five hypotheses with levels of
reality is an entirely plausible interpretation as early as
Speusippus, Plato's own nephew.

The three following contributions that make up the first major
section of vol. 1 broaden the focus so that we can see some of the
deep complexities of interpretation involved in our assessment of
the historical period between the times of Speusippus and Moderatus.

Thomas Szlezák explores the question of the indefinite dyad in
Sextus Empiricus's report at Math. 10.248-283, setting forth
initially good reasons for considering this report to be a
Neopythagorean version of an older report on Plato's famous lecture,
"On the Good?' How does this relate to the interpretation of the
Parmenides that we find in Simplicius's quotation from Porphyry's
testimony on Moderatus's thought, which looks like a Neopythagorean
anticipation of the Neoplatonic hierarchy of hypostases? In the
Sextus passage, the monad and indefinite dyad are said to be the
highest principles of all things (numbers, lines, surfaces,
geometrical bodies, the four elements, and the cosmos). But the
indefiniteness of the dyad is neither explained nor really employed
in the generation of numbers and things, suggesting that we have a
doxographical report that was not really understood philosophically.
By contrast, Plato's Parmenides is philosophically thorough, but the
indefinite dyad is never mentioned; yet in a thinker such as Plato,
who does not care about terms so much as about what is really at
stake, the intended point—that the cooperation of two components is
necessary for anything to come into being—may nevertheless be
legitimately recognized in the Parmenides.

In the history of scholarly criticism, hypotheses 4 and 7 have
been related to the indefinite dyad (of the Unwritten Teachings),
ontologically in 4 and epistemologically in 7. But hypothesis 3 is
more revealing, since the nature of the "other than the one" reveals
itself as unlimitedness, and in hypothesis 2 the doubling of the
existent one has also been seen as referring to the indefinite dyad;
the resultant doubling of every "part" yields an indefinite
multiplicity (143a2) applicable to both intelligible and sensible
realms, as Aristotle attests. And even in the first hypothesis, to
deny the dissimilarity of the one would be akin to distinguishing
between first and second principles. So the Parmenides shows us how
we are to think of the initially puzzling idea of an indefinite
dyad, but we need other dialogues such as the Republic and Timaeus
to arrive at the concept. Sextus's report is Platonic and must be very old because of its explicit use of
the term "indefinite dyad" and it is certainly complementary to the
Parmenides. So this provides a necessary caution that the whole of
Plato's philosophy cannot legitimately be deduced from a single
dialogue, especially if that dialogue does not provide the key to
its own decryption.

Very much in tune with Szlezák's view but in a different key,
Zlatko Plese gives a powerful sense of the different options
available for Plato-interpretation in the first and second centuries
C.E. from Plutarch's dialogue The E at Delphi, in which Ammonius,
Plutarch's teacher, is given a major role in praise of the highest
God. Is Ammonius a character expressing Plutarch's own views, or is
he a historical personality reflecting the monistic tendencies of
Alexandrian Platonism, such as the derivational monism and the one
beyond being of Eudorus? Mtge rejects both of these possibilities as
unwarranted by the text and argues instead that Ammonius's speech is
a sophisticated treatment of Platonic dichotomies (Being/Becoming,
thought/sense-perception, eternity/time) from the Timaeus, Sophist,
Philebus, Cratylus, and Republic, within which earlier compatible
Pre-Socratic theories are integrated and strong resemblances to the
Parmenides can be detected (e.g., Ammonius's abrupt introduction of
"otherness" in the light of Parmenides 143a4-b8 and in the very
setting of Plutarch's dialogue, with its equation of Parmenides with
Ammonius and Socrates with Plutarch). Ammonius's views are not out
of step with those of Plutarch. The history of Platonism is marked
by its cleavage into two different traditions: one dogmatic,
reaching back to the Old Academy, and the other skeptical, initiated
by Arcesilaus. What we find in Ammonius's speech is Plutarch's
passionate homage to the continuing unity of those traditions and
their common opposition to empiricism.

To conclude the first section of vol. 1, Noel Hubler casts
serious doubt upon E. R. Dodds' famous claim that the first-century
Neopythagorean philosopher, Moderatus, had anticipated Plotinus's
supposedly unique theory of hypostases by developing a theory of
emanation through a series of three Ones. Hubler argues that, in
basing his`claim upon a single passage in the sixth-century
commentator, Simplicius, Dodds failed to take into account
Simplicius's own stated preference to supplement, clarify, or apply
descriptions designed to deny the application of physical attributes
to the intelligible realm of Neoplatonic metaphysics. In his
analysis of Simplicius's text, Hubler argues that Simplicius's
Neoplatonist summary and Porphyry's own apparent version of
Moderatus cited by Simplicius recount two different theories,
Porphyry's version being consistent with other testimony he provides
about Moderatus and with what we know from other sources about the
Neopythagoreanism of Moderatus's time. In sum, a textual source long
thought to be definitive for our reconstruction of the history of
thought turns out to be a figment of Simplicius's Neoplatonic
imagination.

We may add, however, that the problem of the origin of the
supposed Neoplatonic hypostases very much remains at issue, for
Plotinus himself makes no claim to originality for his thought and
asserts that his only innovation was the theory of the undescended soul (5.1 [101, a theory rejected by
Iamblichus and the later Neoplatonists anyway). So if not Plotinus,
and if not Moderatus or other Neopythagoreans of the first century,
then where did the theory of three Ones become mapped onto, or out
of, the first three hypotheses of the Parmenides?

SECTION 2: MIDDLE PLATONIC AND GNOSTIC TEXTS

The second major section of vol. 1 brings us into direct contact
with one of the major revolutions in recent times in our ways of
analyzing and categorizing ancient thought. Scholars have typically
tried to separate Platonism from Gnosticism just as they have also
tried to distinguish rational philosophy from irrational religion.
The picture that has recently emerged and that will appear clearly
to the reader of both volumes is much more complex, for with the
discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, and especially, for our
purposes, the Sethian Gnostic "Platonizing" texts (Three Steles of
Seth, Allogenes, Zostrianosl and Marsanes), we are in the presence
of a highly sophisticated religious, soteriological Platonism with
complex triadic and even enneadic structures, a "Platonic"
competitor of early Christianity with equally strong Jewish roots
that antedates not only Iamblichus and Proclus but also Plotinus and
Porphyry. In this "Gnostic" Platonism, as in other strands of a very
complex overall Platonic tradition, religion and philosophy are
interwoven. Moreover, as we shall see below, there are no hermetic
seals to compartmentalize strands of this complex tradition that we
have hitherto regarded as separate. These different texts reflect
upon, and speak sometimes to one another in unexpected ways.

In the first presentation of the second section of vol. 1, John
Turner argues that with the Platonizing Sethian treatises we are at
the cusp of a shift from what is known as Middle Platonism, for
which the principal Platonic dialogue of reference is the Tim aeus ,
towards the Neoplatonism of later times, for which the Parmenides
and Symposium (and the three kings of Plato's Second Letter) assume
I greater importance. This shift can be seen already during the first
and second centuries in Platonists like Moderatus and Numenius who
were attracted by the Neopythagorean doctrines of Eudorus and
Thrasyllus, aspects of which probably go back to Speusippus. As a
result, various expositions and lemmatic commentaries like the Turin
Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides began to uncover the various
metaphysical realities in the hypotheses of the second part of the
Parmenides. In the case of the Sethian treatises, the Unknowable
One, clearly beyond being, is described in negative terms derived
from the first hypothesis, from which the Barbelo Aeon emanates as a
divine Intellect in a sequence of Existence, Vitality/Life, and
Mentality/Intellect roughly parallel to the unfolding of the second
One from the first One of the Anonymous Commentary. In addition, the
negative theologies of these texts in relation to the Unknowable One
(variously characterized in different Sethian texts) are based upon
common sources, probably Middle Platonic epitomes of or commentaries
on the Parmenides, one of which is shared by Allogenes and the
Apocryphon of John, and another by Zostrianos and Marius Victorinus
(first detected by Michel Tardieu and Pierre Hadot in 1996), thus
providing incontestable proof of a pre-Plotinian theological
interpretation of the Parmenides' first hypothesis and suggesting an
interpretation of the second hypothesis as the emergence of a second
from a first One.

All of this suggests that expositions or commentaries on the
Parmenides were available in the late-second or third centuries;
that they were used by the authors of Zostrianos and Allogenes,
works known to Plotinus and Porphyry; that they were Middle Platonic
works; and that in this milieu the Anonymous Commentary may well be
pre-Plotinian (as Bechtle and Corrigan have suggested), especially
since the Anonymous Commentary appears to depend, in part, not only
upon the apparently late second-century Chaldean Oracles but also
upon the source common to both Victorinus and Zostrianos.

This web of intertextual affiliations, therefore, provides an
entirely new view of the history of thought, compelling the
modification of Willy Theiler's longstanding hypothesis, namely,
that every Neoplatonic, non-Plotinian doctrine simultaneously in
Augustine and in a late Neoplatonist author must come from Porphyry.
The Trinitarian theology of Marius Victorinus may come via Porphyry,
but it is based not exclusively in Neoplatonism but in Middle
Platonic thought such as that of the Platonizing Sethian treatises.

There follow two presentations that take a more cautious approach
to some elements in this overall picture. Johanna Brankaer argues by
means of a comparative analysis of the Sethian Platonizing texts
that, while oneness is certainly applied to the supreme entities,
there is no developed henology such as we find in Plotinus. The
articulation of the one and the many is common to both the
Parmenides and Sethian speculation, but oneness is often connected
to Being rather than to a One "beyond being:' What we see in the
Gnostic texts, therefore, is a sophisticated adaptation that recalls
Platonic and Neoplatonic texts, but is really transformed to the
different purpose of a soteriological system.

Volker Drecoll next undertakes to analyze one of the common
sources mentioned by Turner above, namely, the source common to
Zostrianos and Victorinus (on the assumption that this must have
been a Greek text) and argues, on the basis of comparison between
the two texts, that there is a surprisingly small list of common
expressions and even that these might simply reflect common currency
of the day. He therefore suggests that the Tardieu-Hadot hypothesis
should be reconsidered in the light of other possible hypotheses: 1)
Abramowski's hypothesis that behind the parallel sections there was
a common source produced by a crypto-Gnostic Nicene circle at Rome
that Victorinus used without knowing its Barbelo-Gnostic origin.
Drecoll rejects this, however—on the grounds that we have virtually
no evidence for such a circle—in favor of the easier hypothesis,
namely 2) that Victorinus read Gnostic texts but was perfectly
capable of rejecting Gnosticism, and so presented us with a
patchwork of different sources, including Gnostic sources, just as Plotinus read Zostrianos
without becoming a Gnostic. But 3) did Victorinus use the Greek Zostrianos or a text
dependent on it, perhaps a Neoplatonic text with the Gnostic myths
and images expurgated or a Coptic version that could have changed
the Greek source? Drecoll concludes therefore that we know too
little to assume an unknown common source (though it certainly looks
like a plausible solution) or to use this assumption to infer a
pre-Plotinian date for the Anonymous Commentary. There may have been
a common source, but we cannot exclude other possible alternatives.

In the following presentations, we now move to detailed
comparative analyses of some of the major texts in question, most of
them definitely Middle Platonic, but at least one—the Anonymous
Commentary on the Parmenideswhose attribution oscillates back and
forth, as it were, between Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism
according to the eye of the beholder. First, John Turner and Luc
Brisson undertake comparative analyses of the Chaldean Oracles,
Gnostic texts ,and the Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides.
Turner highlights some striking structural similarities in these
texts on several different levels: First, the six-level system of
the Chaldean Oracles is similar to the schemes of Sethian texts.
Second, the enneadic structure that Hadot discerns (on the basis of
John Lydus) in Porphyry's interpretation of the Oracles is strongly
reflected not only in Allogenes' portrayal of the Invisible Spirit's
Triple Power, namely infinitival Existence, indeterminate Vitality,
and determinate Mentality, as an enneadic sequence of three
emanative phases in which each term of the triad sequentially
predominates and contains the other two within each phase of its
unfolding. Third, there are striking structural and functional
resemblances between the Chaldean Hecate and the Sethian
triple-powered One and also between the Sethian Aeon of Barbelo and
the three phases of Hecate's existence as prefiguration, source, and
place of the instantiation of ideal multiplicity. Turner concludes,
therefore, first, that the Sethian authors seem familiar with
Neopythagorean arithmological speculation, with the Being-Life-Mind
triad perhaps derived from Plato's Sophist, and with the implied
metaphysics of the Oracles and, second, that the Being-LifeMind
triad, despite differences in nomenclature, functions in very much
the same emanational context in the Anonymous Commentary on the
Parmenides as in the Sethian texts, with the major difference that
the Sethians (except for the Three Steles of Seth) locate the triad
at the level of the first One and see it as the origin rather than
the result of the emanative process.

What was therefore thought to be much later in the history of
thought, namely, the theory of emanation, and the development of
progressive enneadic structures comprising triads, turns out to be
earlier, at least as early as the late-second or early-third
century. This provides a very different view of the development of
Platonism in a more amorphous and cosmopolitan environment.

Luc Brisson undertakes a similar comparative study on the basis
of folios 9 and 10 of the Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides (in
relation to the first hypothesis) which he argues reveal a
Neoplatonist critique of the Chaldean positive claim that we can
know God. Since God is not an object, only in unknowing does the
soul experience something of God. Unlike the Gnostics, we cannot
claim to know either God or the mode of procession. Such a critique
(undertaken in part via a critique of the Stoic criterion of truth)
might be taken as evidence of a pre-Plotinian date for the
Commentary, but Brisson holds to a post-Plotinian authorship since
this critique implies that the One of the first hypothesis is beyond
being and because it presupposes knowledge of 6.1 [101.8. Brisson
draws two conclusions: First, he locates the shared source of
Victorinus and Zostrianos in the Chaldean Oracles' description of
the Father (frg. 3, 4, 7), which in turn had been influenced by
Plato's description of the One in the first hypothesis of the
Parmenides (142a). Second, he proposes that an earlier commentary on
the Parmenides must have existed at the end of the second century,
one that turned the first God into an Intellect—that is, determinate
Being that was somehow assimilated to the first One of the
Parmenides—and claimed that God could be known, if only indirectly.
For the possibility of this knowledge, the authority of the Oracles
was invoked. This positive commentary was cited by Zostrianos,
criticized by the Anonymous Commentary and available, directly or
indirectly, to Marius Victorinus.

Gerald Bechtle opens up a different avenue of inquiry: the
relation of Plato's Parmenides and Aristotle's Categories. Starting
from Hadot's monumental work, Porphyre et Victorinus (1968), and his
collection of Porphyrian texts in Victorinus in vol. 2, Bechtle
focuses upon group IV of those texts and particularly Hadot's
insight in pinpointing a relation between the extant fragments of
the Parmenides Commentary and the exegetical tradition regarding
Aristotle's`Categories. He poses the broader questions, where do the
surviving bits of the Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides fit
into the Categories-related tradition? and can the latter cast
significant chronological light upon the former? But he focuses here
upon the well-established intertwinement of the two exegetical
traditions by the end of the second century C.E., so standard in
fact as to be mentioned casually in Alcinous's Handbook. Is there
evidence, then, for the metaphysical relevance of the categories
before Plotinus? The already established metaphysical discussion of
Aristotle's categories in Plotinus and Lucius and Nicostratus is
confirmed by Simplicius and Porphyry, as well as by Plotinus
himself. Indeed, nine of Aristotle's categories can be found in some
form in Plato's Parmenides, and the five greatest genera of the
Sophist even more so. Bechtle then goes on to uncover a tradition of
reading Aristotle's categories into the Parmenides in different ways
on the part of Clement, Alcinous, Atticus, and Proclus, a tendency,
he notes, that goes back to Nicomachus of Gerasa. This is an
important project that is part of the unfinished work of the
Parmenides seminar that needs to be extended to a study of the Stoic
categories (as Bechtle has outlined elsewhere) and of Porphyry's
Isagoge as well as its appropriation by Patristic authors,
particularly the Cappadocians.

The question of the date of the Anonymous Commentary on the
Parmenides has been much debated, with Bechtle arguing for Middle
Platonic authorship, Corrigan attributing it to a member of the
school of Numenius (perhaps Cronius) and Brisson suggesting at one point that it may have been
authored by Numenius himself. On the other side, there are many
advocates of the Hadot thesis (that it is by Porphyry), among them
Dillon and, for the most part, Brisson. Volume 1 ends on a slightly
agnostic note, but one that tends to favor authorship either
contemporary with or after Plotinus.

Alain Lernould focuses on the tension implicit in the Anonymous
Commentary to preserve the One's transcendence and yet to make it an
entity that knows and that is not nothing. In particular, he
examines fragments 1 (folios I-II), 2 (folios III-IV), and 4 (folios
IX-X together with the major contemporary translations). He
concludes, against the views of Bechtle, Corrigan, and Turner, that
the Commentary must be after Plotinus (since, for example, in
fragment 1, philosophical prayer, as an ascent of the mind to God
conditioning the possibility of scientific discourse about God, is a
specific feature of post-Plotinian Platonism). It is instead closer
to Damascius than to Proclus, for the author suggests, not that we
should rely on our concepts before negating them, but that we should
not rely on our concepts at all, no matter how elevated, since these
necessarily relate to what is immediately after the One, that is,
the Chaldean triad of Father, Power, Intellect—a position closer to
that of Damascius.

Volume 1 concludes on a historical knife edge, as Luc Brisson
continues what has become his own extended commentary on the
Anonymous Commentary with an analysis of folios XI-XIV in terms of
Numenius's First and Second Gods and the second hypothesis of
Plato's Parmenides. The anonymous commentator distinguishes two
moments in Intellect, the first a state of absolute simplicity in
which it seems to be blended with the One itself and the second a
state in which it emerges from itself to return to itself fully as
Intellect. This is a view that recalls that of Numenius, which
Plotinus once appeared to accept (3.9 [13].1.15-18), but later in
his treatise against the Gnostics (2.9 [33]) rejects. While Brisson
does not take this as evidence for Porphyry's authorship of the
commentary, he sees the commentator trying to account for the
procession of Intellect from the first One into the second, yet
remaining in its cause; he thus aligns himself with Plotinus in the
process.

Volume 2 is divided into two sections: first, Parmenides
interpretation from Plotinus to Damascius and, second, the hidden
influence of the Parmenides in Philo, Origen, Clement, and later
Patristic thought.

SECTION 1: PARMENIDES INTERPRETATION FROM PLOTINUS TO DAMASCIUS

Matthias Vorwerk opens the volume with an overview of the
scholarly state of
the question on the origin of the Plotinian One from Dodds (1928) to
Charrue
(1978). He argues that in the crucial and only text (5.1 [101.8)
where Plotinus introduces, as a correction to Parmenides himself, the
differentiation of three degrees of unity from Plato's Parmenides
that corresponds to his own three hypostases, he mentions the
Parmenides only last in a series of Platonic texts and does not
present it as the key text for his three hypostases. In fact, 5.1
[10].8 shows instead that Plotinus developed his system of
hypostases or "natures" from a series of other Platonic texts
(Letters 2.312e and 6.323d; Timaeus 35a-b, 41d; Republic 509b),
showing considerable skill in interpreting them as complementary,
that is, by subordinating Demiurge and Paradigm to the Good in tune
with most Middle Platonic philosophers. Why, then, was Plotinus
reluctant about the Parmenides? This is probably because the first
three hypotheses cannot be interpreted systematically to correspond
exactly with the three hypostases. They are introduced therefore to
provide additional support for his interpretation and also because
they provide a powerful conceptual source for thinking about the one
and the many.

On the basis of Proclus's Commentary on the Parmenides, Kevin
Corrigan gives an overview of the interpretations of all (whether 8,
9, or 10) of the hypotheses of the second part by Amelius, Porphyry,
Iamblichus, Theodorus of Asine, Plutarch of Athens, Syrianus, and
Proclus, and then provides a reconstruction of what Plotinus's
position might have been despite the absence of direct evidence that
Plotinus held an interpretation of any hypothesis beyond the first
three. By means of small linguistic hints scattered throughout the
Enneads and of comparison between Amelius and Porphyry, Corrigan
argues that while Plotinus clearly did not care to make any
systematic correspondences between hypotheses and their supposed
subjects, he probably held an 8-9 hypothesis view, in between the
positions of Amelius and Porphyry, but perhaps more complex. That
is, like Proclus, he would not have needed to take hypotheses 6-8 or
9 to refer to actual realities, since what appears to be at issue in
them are the negative discourses of quantity, matter, and so on. He
concludes by pointing out in comparison with Plotinus and Porphyry
that Hegel's later treatments of this topic in different works allow
for both a metaphysical interpretation and a logical schema of
possibility: thus the negative hypotheses constitute vanishing
fields of discourse in which self-identity is dissolved. In this
respect, Plotinus, Proclus, and Hegel seem to bear comparison.

Luc Brisson next broadens the focus to give us an unusual look at
the human circle of Plotinus's intimates and associates, the roots
of this circle in Middle Platonism, and its later opposition to
Iamblichean theurgy through the figure of Porphyry. The evidence
tends to show, he argues, that Longinus and Origen the Platonist
(who had studied with Plotinus under Ammonius) defended an
ontological or "being" interpretation of the second part of the
Parmenides. If the Firmus mentioned in the Life of Isidore is
Castricius Firmus, this means that some in Plotinus's own school
were opposed to his new transcendent interpretation of the first
hypothesis. In 5.1 [10].8, for instance, Plotinus relies no longer
on the Timaeus but finds the principles of his exegesis in the
Parmenides. The six fragments of the Anonymous Commentary reflect a similar
historical situation, namely, they are in between Numenius (and
Neopythagorean inspiration) and Theodore of Asine who reuses the
Commentary's doctrines. The author could well be Porphyry or
Amelius. But Iamblichus rejects its audacious affirmation of the
absolute transcendence of the first One coupled with the immanence
of relative things preeminently in the first. In his promotion of
theurgy, Iamblichus subsequently elevated the entire hierarchy of
gods by one rank and broke the limits of the Parmenides because his
ineffable One beyond the One fell outside Plato's hypotheses and
therefore outside the text of Plato. Armed with his edition of
Plotinus's works in his final years, Porphyry was therefore led to
oppose the spirit of Greek rationalism to lamblichus's break with
that spirit.

This is a plausible picture, but is it right? Vorwerk would not
agree with its analysis of 5.1 [10].8, and there is much evidence in
pre-Plotinian periods for a One that is beyond being in some sense
or other, as we have seen.

Tuomas Rasimus provides a groundbreaking alternative view by
arguing against Hadot's attribution to Porphyry of 89 fragments of
clearly Platonic technical metaphysics found in Victorinus'
trinitarian treatises and in the six fragments of the Anonymous
Commentary on the Parmenides (taking full account of the earlier
work of Bechtle, Corrigan, and Turner) and by suggesting instead
something that has hitherto been unthinkable, namely, that the
authorship of the latter is more likely to have been Sethian
Gnostic. Many of the ideas contained in the fragments of the
Anonymous Commentary are better attested in Sethian texts than in
the undisputed Porphyrian material and many of the supposed
Porphyrian features (e.g., intelligible triad identified with the
highest One; distinction between infinitival and substantive being;
juxtaposition of paronyms, etc.) are already found in pre-Plotinian
Gnostic sources, that is, in the Apocryphon of John and the possibly
common, likely Gnostic, source behind Zostrianos and Victorinus.
Some evidence even suggests that Porphyry cannot be the author of
the Anonymous Commentary on the Parmenides. Indeed, as Serge
Cazelais (2005) has shown, the expression which occurs three times
in the Commentary and six times in the undisputed Porphyrian
evidence—and which Hadot took to be a veritable signature of
Porphyry—occurs at least eighty times in the writings of Origen of
Alexandria. The Platonizing Sethian treatises show a good doctrinal
match with the fragments of the Commentary. The Apocryphon of John
shows similarities with the Chaldean Oracles and even betrays signs
of the use of Stoic physics in the service of Platonic metaphysics
similar to that Hadot has claimed for Porphyry.

At the very least, then, we have to reassess Hadot's theory and
the role of the Sethian Gnostics in the development of Neoplatonism,
since the evidence shows that it was the Sethian Gnostics rather
than Porphyry who were the innovators.

Is such a thesis really defensible? Certainly, the preponderance
of evidence supports it. Furthermore, if it is possible for Victorinus or
Plotinus to read Gnostic texts and not become Gnostics, then it is even more plausible
for a Gnostic of considerable sophistication, and perhaps with intimate
knowledge of a school such as that of Plotinus, to write a
commentary for a different "Platonic" audience on a work of crucial
importance to both groups. If Mozart could write the Magic Flute,
then a Sethian Gnostic could have written a lemmatic commentary on
the Parmenides.

So also Volker Drecoll takes up the question of Hadot's
attribution of these eighty-nine fragments in Victorinus to Porphry
and provides a detailed analysis of Victorinus's use of sources in
the Ad Candidum, Adversus Arium 1B, 3, and 4. He concludes that
there is no evidence for a single source and therefore no warrant
for supposing that Victorinus at every point must be dependent on
Porphyry. Drecoll and Rasimus together therefore indicate the need
for a complete rethinking of these issues (and see Edwards below).

But we leave the Anonymous Commentary still poised between
Hadot's thesis and its revision, a fitting way of representing the
state of the question in contemporary scholarship, for Luc Brisson
goes on to unpack vestiges of a logical interpretation in folios 7-8
of the Commentary that he interprets (within the historical schema
of Proclus's Commentary) as a training for dialectic by means of a
logical exercise that must be seen, in the manner of Aristotle's
Sophistical Refutations, as an exercise for escaping sophism. From
Iamblichus on, this interpretation was opposed by what became in
Proclus the dominant interpretation of the Parmenides as a treatise
on theology. In Brisson's view, to write such a commentary as the
Anonymous Commentary is impossible without a library, senior
philosophers, and a deeper commitment to a theological reading; this
is impossible outside a scholarly context similar to that of the
school of Plotinus.

The concluding papers of section 1 of vol. 1 concern some of the
fascinating developments in later Neoplatonism: in Iamblichus,
Syrianus, Damascius, and Simplicius, with the presence of Proclus,
of course, everywhere.

John Finamore reconstructs from fragments of Iamblichus in
Damascius and Proclus Iamblichus's unique interpretation of the
Parmenides' third hypothesis as concerning not souls, but superior
classes of beings (angels, daemons, and heroes). He interprets this
as resulting from lamblichus's interpretation of elements in the
Phaedrus myth and of Diotima-Socrates' representation of daemons as
two-way messengers between heaven and earth in the Symposium; and he
argues that it reflects Iamblichus's peculiar view that there is a
class of purified souls that can descend and yet remain unharmed.
This interpretation, rejected by the later Neoplatonists,
nonetheless allowed Iamblichus both to follow Plato (perhaps
disastrously in the view of Porphyry and others, as Brisson argued
above in The Reception of the Parmenides before Proclus") and to
create a working doctrine of theurgy in which each class of soul
played a different role.

John Dillon explores the startling exegesis of the Parmenides'
second hypothesis by Syrianus, Proclus's teacher, and his insight
that each of the fourteen distinct propositions constituting this
hypothesis corresponds to a separate level of entity within the intelligible world: three triads of intelligible gods,
three triads of intelligible-intellective gods, an intellectual hebdomad (two triads and
a seventh entity, the "membrane"). If we count each triad as a
single unit, this results in nine units. Syrianus therefore adds
another five: hypercosmic gods; hypercosmic-encosmic gods; encosmic
gods; universal souls; superior classes of beings (angels, daemons
and heroes, not—like Iamblichus—to be ascribed to the third
hypothesis). This gives a total of fourteen to correspond to the
fourteen propositions of the second hypothesis. What possible
justification could Syrianus have found in the text? In a
fascinating analysis, Dillon articulates a plausible justification
for the entire structure that reveals a blueprint for the structure
of both the intelligible and sensible universes.

Sarah Abel-Rappe then goes on to show how Damascius's treatment
of the third hypothesis correlates with the way the Neoplatonists
see the soul and its multiple configurations as the foundation of a
"way of seeming" that is the ultimate subject of Damascius's
Commentary on the Parmenides. If soul is the entry to non-being and
the last four hypotheses are way-stations on the path to complete
unreality, then the entry into the dimensions of soul begins in the
third hypothesis. Unlike lamblichus, for whom the soul's
helplessness necessitates divine assistance, the soul is instead a
self-mover that is nonetheless capable of altering the quality of
its essence and so of its very identity by the focus of its
attention and its capacity to experience time in different ways
(instant-time and now-time). On the one hand, the individual soul is
a modality of intelligible seeing. On the other hand, it is the
gateway to Plato's own "way of seeming."

Finally, to conclude section 1 of vol. 2, Gerald Bechtle explores
what it means to metaphysicize the Aristotelian categories. If the
categories link language and reality and if they imply not only the
ten most general classes of being but also the movement from the
physical to the metaphysical (a movement unsupported by Aristotle's
Categories on its own), then their application to divine things is
understandable. Moreover, in the tradition of Categories exegesis,
this application paved the way for their application to properly
Christian theological entities (praedicatio in divinis), not simply
in Boethius but even earlier with the Cappadocians (as
Radde-Gallwitz's Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and the
Transformation of Divine Simplicity [Oxford: Oxford University
Press, forthcoming] also makes clear). What does this
metaphysicizing in Simplicius mean? Simplicius chooses to comment on
the Categories and not the Parmenides, thereby reversing an entire
Platonic tradition. So Bechtle examines the only two passages where
Simplicius refers to the Parmenides and shows that while Simplicius
himself does not refer the categories to anything other than
sensibles as they are signified by words, nonetheless, in relation
to his source, probably Iamblichus, he sees the One of the
Parmenides, running through the different hypotheses/hypostases, as
everywhere expressive of the community and continuity of the
categories, whether applying to all of them vertically or only to
one horizontally. Simplicius, by means of Iamblichus, therefore,
reinvigorates a pre-Plotinian tradition that goes back at least as
far as Alcinous.

SECTION 2: THE HIDDEN INFLUENCE OF THE PARMENIDES IN PHILO,
ORIGEN, AND LATER PATRISTIC THOUGHT

In the papers of section 2 of vol. 2, on the Parmenides in
relation to Jewish and Christian thought, we move from Philo and
Clement through Origen and the Cappadocians to Pseudo-Dionysius, an
examination, as far as we know, never before undertaken in this
form.

David Runia points out that Philo never mentions Plato's
Parmenides and that the Timaeus trumps any possible influence from
the Parmenides we might try to find in Philo. Whittaker and Dillon
suppose the influence of the first hypothesis at work in Eudoran,
Philonic, Clementine, and Hermetic texts, but it is difficult to
confirm this in Philo's well-known negative theology and also in
what may appear to be the dialectical categories of the Parmenides
(e.g., whole-part, limit-unlimited, etc.) in Philo's doctrine of
creation. Clement of Alexandria, however, is different, despite the
absence of explicit references to the Parmenides (except implicitly
in Stromateis 5.112.2). In two passages (Stromateis 5.81-82 and
4.156) he uses the dialectical argumentation of the first hypothesis
to develop a negative theology of absolute transcendence and of both
the first and second hypotheses to develop a positive theology
focused on the Son. Thus, the problem of the one and many is given a
new theological solution that does not involve a hierarchy of gods.

Mark Edwards, in a groundbreaking work very much in tune with
that of Tuomas Rasimus above, examines two topics: the use of a
formula and the provenance of the Anonymous Commentary which uses
the phrase. In the case of the formula, only Philo and Origen
juxtapose the terms, but Christians could make use of privative
terms without being driven to the antinomian logic of the
Parmenides. In the case of the latter, however, if we cannot accept
that the Being-Life-Mind triad antedated orthodox Platonism, but
must have been an invention of Porphyry somehow intuited from the
Chaldean Oracles and Plato's Sophist, then the Zostrianos we possess
must be a secondarily doctored text. On the other hand, if
reflections on the first and second hypotheses can be found in
Allogenes, then perhaps such reflection is more Christian than
Platonist. Is there any trace of Christianity then in the Anonymous
Commentary? The formula found in Origen and Philo appears only in
the Anonymous Commentary and in no other pagan text—a little like
the "god over all" formula that is more characteristic of Origen
than of Porphyry. So the author of the Commentary was perhaps a
Christian or someone who occupied an intellectual hinterland,
unknown to Irenaeus, of free trade between paganism and
Christianity. If we cannot accept that a Christian of the second
century might comment on Plato, then we should read the puzzling
version of a passage from the Republic in the Nag Hammadi collection
(NHC VI,5) that no one quite knows how to classify.

Edwards's second contribution poses the broader question what
"dependence" really means when we uncritically call someone like
Origen a "Platonist" and he rejects many facile characterizations or
caricatures of what such dependence might mean, making us more aware
that apparent similarity of phrase, doctrine, text, or even
quotation is no guarantee that we do not actually encounter radical
difference. We include this essay in this volume as a necessary
corrective to seeing Platonism or even anti-Platonism everywhere or
to characterizing thinkers like Philo and Origen as Platonists and
then, as is often the case, reducing unique forms of thought to
adjectival denominationalisms. Even in cases where we can detect
traces of the use of or meditations upon Platonic dialogues such as
the Parmenides or Timaeus, these may be in the service of an
entirely different universe of reference.

Jean Reynard then gives us a fascinating tour of the possible
presence or significant lack of the Parmenides in Gregory of Nyssa
and his older brother, Basil of Caesarea. We can suppose direct or
indirect influence of the Parmenides in Gregory's discussions of
participation, virtue, unity of God yet plurality of hypostases,
Christology, Gregory's peculiar theory of humanity and individual
human beings, negative theology, and view of motion. But we cannot
say for certain whether or not this is the case. Basil seems more
promising because of his early connection with Eustathius of
Cappadocia, a pupil of lamblichus, and because of his youthful,
disputed work De`Spiritu, which shares strong links with Plotinus.
But why is there such complete silence about the Parmenides? Reynard
argues cogently that this was not because Basil and Gregory did not
have the dialogue in their manuals, but because Iamblichus's
Neoplatonic interpretation influenced and shaped Neo-Arianism,
Aetius and Eunomius in particular, and so lamblichean Neoplatonism
represented a hard-line form of Neoplatonism that had to be
rejected.

Kevin Corrigan takes up the same issues in a different key and
argues that the shadow of the Neoplatonic hypostases and the
hypotheses of the Parmenides (as explicitly connected by Plotinus in
Enn. 5.1 1101.8—a work certainly read by Basil and Gregory of Nyssa)
can be seen generally in Basil's De Spiritu Sancto, more prominently
in Athanasius's Adv. At 1.18, and conspicuously in Gregory
Nazianzus's Third Theological Oration, where we can clearly detect a
complex meditation upon the second hypothesis of the Parmenides
partly through the lens of language from Resp. 8.545c-d and the
dispute of the one with itself. The Trinity, Gregory argues, cannot
be split from itself or become perfect by addition. It is perfect
already by virtue of something like the Plotinian principle of
synneusis. Thus Athanasius and the Cappadocians are concerned 1) to
distance themselves from the Neoplatonic hypostases in the concrete
knowledge that they are derived, in part, from Plato's Parmenides;
2) to show that the Trinity cannot be conceived as functioning like
some second hypothesis either by addition or by being qualitatively
or quantitatively cut up into plurality; and, 3) to indicate
(especially in the case of Gregory of Nyssa) that while the overall
Neoplatonic worldview obviously has to be rejected, there is
nonetheless a triadic causal procession of sameness and otherness in
Plotinus and Porphyry that results in the hypostases or individual
persons, as it were, being substantially included in divine
substance rather than being severally distributed into a hierarchy
of different substances. Corrigan therefore concludes that the
fourth-century Fathers were well aware of the second part of the
Parmenides and that, in fact, this text was an indispensable
backdrop, however indirect, for the formulation of Trinitarian
theology in this century.

The strength and persistence of this hidden tradition of
Parmenides interpretation is taken up by Andrew Radde-Gallwitz in
the closing contribution of vol. 2 on Pseudo-Dionysius (or Denys the
Areopagite) and the problem of contradiction, a problem also to be
found in the Buddhist tradition as Radde-Gallwitz illustrates in his
epigraph, a tetralemma from the third century C.E. philosopher
Nagarjuna, which seems, like the language of Denys about God, to
undermine the laws of non-contradiction and excluded middle. As we
have seen in the earlier Patristic tradition, the Parmenides' first
hypothesis leads to negative, the second to positive, theology.
Denys, of course, cannot divide levels of Divinity like the pagan
Neoplatonists and so must apply the two hypotheses to one God, but
in what sense? To different aspects or moments of God (abiding and
procession) to avoid contradiction, that is, a causal
interpretation? Or to God in the sense that such language is not
subject to either law, that is, a transcendent interpretation? Both
solutions have been adopted by modern scholarship, but which is
right?

If the causal interpretation is right, does such language name
intrinsic properties or not? Proclus says they do not; they only
name the relation of other things to God. But Denys appears to hold
that they do name intrinsic properties or a diversity unified in God
that he illustrates by means of a sun image (Republic 7) similar to
Socrates' day analogy in the Parmenides, which seems a red herring
since it explains only the simultaneous participation of many things
in Being, not a diversity of unified divine properties. Denys,
however, seems to mean that God contains causes that appear merely
relative. But how, since he also denies every predicate he affirms
of God? Radde-Gallwitz's solution is that the causal interpretation,
instead of contradicting the transcendent interpretation, actually
implies it. The laws of non-contradiction and excluded middle do not
apply in theology. So we have in Denys a kind of ouroboric maneuver
by which positive and negative theologies live only by ending in
their own destruction.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, then, let us briefly sum up some of the major
results of these two volumes:

1) The preponderance of evidence overthrows the standard view,
proposed originally by Proclus, that there was no metaphysical
interpretation of the second part of the Parmenides before Origen
the Platonist. It is more reasonable to discern such an
interpretation going back to Speusippus, Plato's nephew and heir,
approximately five hundred years and more before Origen.

2) At some time before the end of the first century C.E., someone
in the Platonic-Neopythagorean tradition also came to the conclusion
that Plato was presenting in the Parmenides a blueprint for the
structure of reality. Even if we cannot be certain that Simplicius's
account of Porphyry's report of the doctrine of Moderatus on the
three ones is not simply Simplicius's interpolation of his own
Neoplatonic views, nonetheless, the notion of a one in some sense or
other beyond being must be pre-Plotinian since it goes back 1) to
Sextus Empiricus's very old, Platonic account of Plato's last
lecture, 2) to Speusippus's view of the one as the smallest
principle beyond being from which all the dimensions of beings can
be deduced, 3) to Alexandrian Platonism, especially Eudorus, and 3)
to the Unknowable One of the Sethian treatises—not to mention 4) to
Plato's dialogues themselves, including both the letters associated
with his name and the early accounts of the unwritten teachings.

3) The evidence suggests that expositions or commentaries on the
Parmenides were available in the late-second or third centuries,
that they were used by the authors of the Sethian treatises,
Zostrianos, and Allogenes, works known to Plotinus and Porphyry, and
that they were generally Middle Platonic works.

4) In the case of the Sethian treatises, the Unknowable One,
clearly beyond being, is described in negative terms derived from
the first hypothesis, from which the Barbelo Aeon emanates as an
Intellect in a sequence of phases designated as Existence, Life, and
Intellect in a way roughly parallel to the unfolding of the second
One from the first One of the Anonymous Commentary. In addition, the
negative theologies of these texts in relation to the Unknowable One
are based upon common sources, probably Middle Platonic epitomes of
or commentaries on the Parmenides, one of which is shared by
Allogenes and the Apocryphon of John, and another by Zostrianos and
Marius Victorinus, thus providing incontestable proof of a
pre-Plotinian theological interpretation of the Parmenides's first
hypothesis and perhaps even an interpretation of the second
hypothesis as the emergence of a second from a first One.

5) Analysis of Victorinus's use of sources shows that Victorinus
does not use a single source, whether derived from Porphyry, as
Pierre Hadot supposes, or from someone else.

6) Contemporary scholarship on the Anonymous Commentary remains
divided as to its date and authorship, as the reader will see
throughout. Luc Brisson argues powerfully and consistently for a
Plotinian or post-Plotinian author, Amelius or Porphyry. Gerald
Bechtle, Kevin Corrigan, and John Turner have argued (elsewhere) for
Middle Platonic authorship. A serious alternative has been proposed
for the first time in vol. 2 on the basis of what seems to be the
best interpretation of the strongest evidence. Tuomas Rasimus
proposes a Sethian Gnostic and Mark Edwards a Christian author (in
what almost amounts to the same thing). Before now such views were virtually unthinkable,
but, we suggest, this will be a benchmark for future scholarship and
the case of note either to reject or to explore further.

7) Indeed, the Being-Life-Mind triad, one of the most
characteristically Platonic-Neoplatonic triads in the history of
thought, and a triad partly derived from Plato's Sophist and the
Chaldean Oracles, was most probably developed in large measure by
Sethian Gnostic thinkers.

8) Despite the undoubted importance of Plotinus, the traditional
view of Plotinus as the "father" of Neoplatonism and the
"originator" of the doctrine of the three "Ones:' should be
seriously rethought on the basis that both Gnostics and Platonists
seem to be the joint inheritors of a tradition that may well go back
to the early Academy.

9) Parmenides interpretation and the Categories exegetical
tradition are in important ways intertwined and Gerald Bechtle has
uncovered a tradition of reading Aristotle's categories into the
Parmenides, in different ways, in Clement, Alcinous, Atticus, and
Proclus, a tendency that goes back to Nicomachus of Gerasa and
assumes a different nuance later in Simplicius. This interwoven
tradition is of major importance for the development of Christian
thought.

10) The shadow of Parmenides interpretation looms large over the
early Christian developments of both negative and positive
theologies and plays a crucial, if often unspoken role, in the later
need to combat hard-line Iamblichean Neoplatonism, reflected in Neo-Arianism,
as well as in the development and formulation of
Athanasian-Cappadocian Trinitarian theology, where it proves to be
decisive. The Parmenides emerges from the shadow with new heuristic
clarity in Pseudo-Dionysius's rethinking of cataphatic and apophatic
theology.